1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to business-form handling method and system for recognizing automatically various species of business forms such as deposit slips, checks, drafts, transfer slips, and the like which are handled, for example, by financial institutions for supplying required information or data set forth i.e., written, printed or stated) on the business forms to a succeeding form-relevant tasks/jobs processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
In the financial institutions such as banks, post offices and the like, there are widely employed automatic teller machines. However, business form such as chits or slips for public utilities charges (tax, telephone charges, electric fees, etc.), checks, drafts and the like can not be handled by the automatic teller machine. Accordingly, money reception, disbursement, transfer and the like transaction businesses which involve handling of business forms such as checks, receipt slips, etc. are carried out by clerks at the window (also referred to as the service counter). Further, services at the window such as reception/payment of large amount of money by checks or the like which can not be handled by the automatic teller machine are carried out by using receipt/payment slips.
Such being the circumstances, clerk in charge of performing so-called counter business at the window by handling various species of business forms are necessarily forced to discriminate definitely the species of the business forms such as the receipt/payment slips received from customers and then check the business forms as to whether the business form is filled in with all necessary particulars and/or whether the business form suffers error in the statement of e.g. the account number, the customer""s name and/or the like, whereon relevant jobs are performed in conjunction with the business form as accepted.
The species of the business forms to be handled at the window or counter in banks, post offices or the like can be globally classified into (1) a prescribed-type business form of a format prescribed by a given bank or the like institute, (2) a barcode-affixed business form prescribed by telephone company, electric power company or the like enterprises (business concerns) for receiving public utilities charges such as telephone charges, electric fees, etc. and printed with enterprise identification codes in the form of barcode at a predetermined position or in a predetermined field, (3) a business form which conforms to the standards prescribed by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and on which a symbol code of telephone company, electric power company, consumer credit company or the like is printed at a predetermined position or in a predetermined field in the form of a numeric code having a plurality of digits, (4) checks or promissory notes issued by a given bank and others banks, (5) business forms issued by individual local governments for claiming payment of local taxes, (6) business form of a common format prescribed universally by the banks nationwide, and so forth.
Thus, for the clerk at the window (or counter) of the financial institution such as the bank or the post office, it is a first and big task imposed on him or her to discriminative which of the business form species classified globally as mentioned above the business form as received belongs.
Heretofore, discrimination or identification of the species of business form as received has been performed visually by the clerk at the window. Consequently, when lots of time is taken for discriminative decision of the species of the business form, stagnation will be incurred in the clerical tasks at the window, which in turn will incur degradation of the quality of services for the customers.
Further, in recent years, network configuration financial systems capable of receiving various public utilities charges tend to be adopted not only in the banks and the post offices but also in retail stores or shops. However, since many of clerks of the retail stores lack in training or education concerning the financial network system technology, the clerks will encounter a great difficulty in discriminative determination of the business forms species of large variety, giving rise to a problem that erroneous business form identification may be made. For these reasons, high reliability and high operation efficiency can not be ensured for the financial or monetary system, to another disadvantage.
In the light of the state of the art described above, it is an object of the present invention to provide a business form handling method which is capable of identifying automatically and positively a large variety of business form species within a reduced time without any appreciable difficulty to thereby enhance efficiency of succeeding form-relevant tasks or jobs in financial institutions or the like.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a business-form handling system for carrying out the method mentioned above.
In view of the above and other objects which will become apparent as the description proceeds, there is provided according to an aspect of the present invention a business form handling method which includes the steps of reading by an image reading device business forms of plural species which differ from one another in respect to a field of the image to be cut, deciding discriminatively whether or not the read image is relevant to a business form of a first species by referencing form species identifying definition information stored previously in a file, and cutting an image from a field corresponding to a format inherent to the business form of the first species when the read image is relevant to the business form of the first species, to thereby recognize the contents of statement from the cut image, whereas when the read image is irrelevant to the business form of the first species, deciding discriminatively whether or not the read image is relevant to a business form of a second species by referencing the form species identifying definition information stored previously in the file, and cutting image from a field corresponding to a format inherent to the business form of the second species when the read image is relevant to the business form of the second species, to thereby recognize the contents of statement from the cut image.
The above and other objects, features and attendant advantages of the present invention will more easily be understood by reading the following description of the preferred embodiments thereof taken, only by way of example, in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.